The present disclosure relates to printing self-test pages, and more particularly, to printing customized self-test pages formatted in a uniform manner across various printing devices for use in an automated data-entry process.
Printing is a critical business function for many companies. Larger companies in particular usually have a need for a wide variety of printed or hardcopy output. Maintaining the diverse inventory of printers and printer-related products necessary to meet such printing needs can involve significant expenditures in both employee time and money. Therefore, companies that do not want to manage all aspects of their printing needs often contract with outside vendors that provide printing services tailored to the specific needs of the company. Typical agreements between printing-service vendors and customers involve the lease of a fleet of printers. The printing-service vendors usually agree to manage and maintain the printer fleet for the duration of the lease.
Printing-service agreements are often billed on a usage basis such as a certain fee for each printed page. The agreements typically include adjustments to the amount billed per-page based on factors such as the type of page printed, the type of print medium used, the type of printing device involved and the like. For example, the agreement may specify a higher billing rate for a legal sized page than for a letter sized page based on the likelihood that the legal sized page will require more consumable printing items such as toner. Similarly, color documents may be billed at a higher rate than black and white documents, and photo-quality print media may be billed at a higher rate than normal paper media.
Accordingly, for each billing period a printing-service vendor must gather detailed usage information from every printing device in a leased printer fleet in order to properly account for the services that have been provided to the customer for the period. The usage information is entered into the vendor""s accounting system and manipulated based on the terms of the agreement in order to generate a bill for the customer.
Currently, the primary method of transferring usage information from each printing device in a printer fleet to a vendor""s accounting system is very inefficient. The method involves accessing each printer device and retrieving a standardized self-test page. When all the self-test pages are retrieved, the information from each page is manually entered into the vendor accounting system. Because the format of each self-test page is based on the specific design of the printing device from which it came, the variation in pages is as great as the variation in printing devices within a printer fleet. Therefore, the manual task of discerning the proper information from each self-test page and entering it into the accounting system can be tedious and expensive.
One method of automatically entering printer usage information from self-test pages into a vendor accounting system is to scan the pages and process the information on a computer with optical character recognition software. However, the significant variation found in the formats of self-test pages makes this method of automatic data entry unreliable. Many of the font types and font sizes encountered on the various self-test pages do not lend themselves favorably to optical character recognition. Therefore, numerous errors can occur when processing groups of self-test pages, and the task of manually locating and correcting these errors is difficult and time consuming. Thus, most vendors stick with the method of manually entering printer usage data from self-test pages into their accounting systems.
Accordingly, the need exists for a way to easily and automatically enter printer usage information from self-test pages into a printing-service vendor""s accounting system.
A formatting device accesses and formats usage information collected by a printing device and outputs a print job to the printing device to be printed as a customized self-test page. Formatted usage information on the customized self-test page can be scanned and automatically entered into an accounting system using optical character recognition software executing on a computer.
In an exemplary embodiment, an operator establishes a temporary communication interface between a hand-held formatting device and a printing device. The formatting device queries the printing device to determine the model number of the printing device and to access information about the past usage of the printing device. The formatting device receives and formats usage information based on known characteristics of the identified printing device. Formatting includes setting font types and font sizes for the usage information that are familiar to the identified printing device. A print job is created that contains the formatted usage information incorporated into a customized self-test page. The formatting device sends the print job to the printing device which outputs the print job as a customized self-test page that presents the formatted usage information.
In another embodiment, formatting the usage information includes configuring the usage information in a bar-code format. Bar-coded usage information is incorporated into a customized self-test page that is printed by the printing device and readily scanned and entered into an accounting system.